Pink Triangle Portraits

Project in Process - August - December 2020

 Draft Artist's Statement

In December 1938, a photograph was made of men lined up at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They wear triangles on their prison uniforms, often presumed to be pink triangles, identifying them as homosexuals. The photograph was seized by the US Government during the conquest of Nazi Germany in 1945 and became part of the US National Archive.

In the late 1970s, the pink triangle was reclaimed by the gay liberation movement, converting a symbol of oppression into one of pride. In the 1980s and 1990s, that triangle was used by ACT-UP in their Silence = Death campaign, to call for action to address the AIDS pandemic, a greater threat to the lives of gay men than the holocaust had been.

Today, in 2020, I am presenting this history as personal, working with the image of these men at Sachsenhausen 82 years ago. I am stepping into their bodies with photographic self portraits. I am putting my hands on their bodies with drawings and watercolor portraits. 

Larry Wolf, August 2020

The Source Image - Sachsenhausen December 19, 1938


Unknown Photographer,
Prisoners in the Concentration Camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany (1938), 
US National Archive of Foreign Records


The Individual Men - Cropped Images

Pink Triangle Man #1

Pink Triangle Man #2

Pink Triangle Man #3

Pink Triangle Man #4

Pink Triangle Man #5

Pink Triangle Man #6

Pink Triangle Man #7

Pink Triangle Man #8

Pink Triangle Man #9


The Source Image As Modified For Rough Raw Reclaimed

Larry Wolf, Rough Raw Reclaimed - page 5 (2021)
Not The First Time, Not The Last Time

Text From Rough Raw Reclaimed

Men lined up in uniforms in the cold grey of December 1938. Branded as homosexual, they were reduced to a number, worked to death, shot for minor offenses or no offense at all. 

The society that had been the most sexually progressive changed almost overnight when Hitler became chancellor. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, advocates for homosexuals as fully human, was ransacked. The longstanding but often unenforced Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual acts between males, was expanded in 1935; entrapment, denunciation and betrayal followed.

In 1945, when the concentration camps were liberated, the men of the pink triangle were kept in prison. They were denied compensation for their years in the concentration camps. Paragraph 175 remained in effect for another five decades.

https://www.larrywolf51.com/p/rough-raw-reclaimed.html 

Photographic Self Portraits As These Men

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Self Portrait (2020)

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Self Portrait (2020)

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Self Portrait (2020)

Watercolors

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Watercolor (2020)

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Watercolor (2020)

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Watercolor (2020)

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Watercolor (2020)

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Watercolor (2020)

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Watercolor (2020)

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Watercolor (2020)

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Watercolor (2020)

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Watercolor (2020)


Drawings


Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Drawing (2020)


Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Drawing (2021)


Related Blog Posts









Pink Triangle Portraits - A Work in Progress


No comments: